The 'Real' Unemployment Rate Is Still Really Lousy [U-6 unemployment rate is 14.7%]

If you have doubts about the official jobless rate, there's another rate you can check out instead--the "real" unemployment rate, which measures everybody considered unemployed plus a lot of others who are falling through the cracks....

... the government's own U-6 measure is even higher, at 14.7 percent. That's the percentage of adult Americans who are unemployed, underemployed, too discouraged to look for work or "marginally attached" to the labor force.

The 'Real' Unemployment Rate Is Still Really Lousy [U-6 unemployment rate is 14.7%]

The U-6 is not the "real" unemployment rate. It is far too optimistic.

According to BLS definitions:

U-1 Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force
U-2 Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force
U-3 Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)
U-4 Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers (Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work)
U-5 Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force (Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months)
U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force (Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule)

Did you note the groups that were not included?

Those people who have managed to go on social security disability and those people who are not looking for work and have not given a job-market related reason for not looking.

The total labor force has gone down by 2,000,000 people in the past 2 months alone. If you added just those 2 months, all the numbers would be far, far higher.

140m tax filers... if 50% of those were married, which would be very high, that would mean 210m workers in the country

and we supposedly have 24m unemployed

AT BEST unemployment is 11.4%. (ie: 24 / 210)

yet no one calls them on their bullshit

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls

Selecting the first two (Labor Force & employment), then plugging into a spreadsheet and calculating the difference, I get the following (numbers in thousands)

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2007 7116 6926 6731 6849 6767 6978 7149 7067 7170 7237 7240 7645
2008 7678 7491 7817 7631 8396 8578 8950 9450 9500 10083 10544 11298
2009 12049 12861 13389 13796 14506 14727 14647 14861 15011 15421 15226 15123
2010 14954 15039 15128 15222 14876 14516 14609 14735 14574 14637 15104 14393
2011 13920 13751 13628 13792 13892 14024 13908 13920 13897 13760 13323 13097
2012 12758 12806 12673 12500 12720 12748 12793 12544 12089

In other words, there are 40 thousand fewer unemployed than when Obama took office

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